Twitter users fight back against anti-Semitism with punctuation

Twitter users have begun reclaiming an anti-Semitic indicator on Twitter by adopting it proudly — even if they aren’t Jewish.

Prominent figures and ordinary users alike have begun changing their profile names by encasing them in triple parentheses, which have been used by far right and anti-Semitic activists to identify and target Jewish figures online, the BBC reported.

The triple parentheses reference a trope in the far right movement of mocking Jewish names by modifying them with an echo effect, which the parentheses represent, according to Mic. In November of last year, Jewish writers like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic began noticing tweets directed at them with their names in triple parentheses — and abuse that would often follow referencing the punctuation, the BBC reported.

The reason for the parentheses, according to a Mic investigation, was more sinister: they worked with a now-removed Google Chrome extension called “Coincidence Detector” to identify “anti-white” and Jewish identities for harassment.

Jonathan Weisman, a New York Times editor, wrote about the abuse for his publication in May, when he too became the target of online abuse after receiving the tweet “Hello (((Weisman))),” “intuiting that my last name in brackets denoted my Jewish faith,” he wrote.

Though he wrote that he had been “largely disconnected from Jewish life and faith over the years,” he said he had continued to receive anti-Semitic memes and tweets, “much of it from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters.”

The Coincidence Detector extension was removed from the Google Chrome store shortly after Mic’s investigation, but Twitter users — even those who don’t identify as Jewish — started changing their names in solidarity after a call from Tablet writer Yair Rosenberg:

Several agreed to help:

Others took the meme a few steps further, inspiring humor:

This story was originally published June 8, 2016 at 1:24 PM with the headline "Twitter users fight back against anti-Semitism with punctuation."